I’d figured as much. I’d scoured the news last night and this morning for reports on the Factory fire. Mentions were usually brief and called the building a historical relic, with no indication that the inside had looked more like a swanky hotel than an abandoned building.
“It won’t be habitable right away while it’s being repaired, but it can be restored.”
“Hooray,” I said sarcastically, though I was actually glad to hear it. Back when I’d first come to Seattle, when I’d still been a vampire, I’d found the Factory gauche, Cazimir over the top, and had very rarely bothered to set foot inside unless I needed the incinerator. Now that so much had changed, though, the thought of the Factory ceasing to exist was unsettling. I wanted it to remain. I wanted Cazimir to wake up and take it back, and restore it to its former Haunted Mansion glory.
Sean ignored my blithe reply. “The mortals who set the fire are another story. Lark is letting them be for now, while she figures out the best course of action.”
“Okay,” I said. He eyed me strangely. “Wait, I’m not one of the mortals in her equation?”
“No, of course not,” he said, taken aback by the notion. “You’ve simply developed a rapport with some of them, and I thought—“
“I haven’t,” I corrected.
Sean pursed his lips. This wasn’t going how he expected—I could tell, though I didn’t know what he had expected. Me, gratefully throwing myself into his arms?
“Henri—” Sean started.
Erin’s car pulled up the sidewalk, parking illegally in front of a fire hydrant. She got out before she realized I was on the stoop already. She saw Sean and remained near her car, waving at me rather than approaching.
Sean studied Erin, his posture stiff, his jaw tight. “Is she a witch?” he asked. It was a simple question, born of curiosity rather than animosity.
“She is,” I said. “And she’s my ride.”
Sean grabbed my hand as I turned to go, and I stopped. He kissed the back of it quickly and gave me a tight smile. “Whatever danger you’re about to run toward, do be careful.”
“Why do you assume there’s danger?”
“I know you,” he said simply.
Sometimes I wondered about that, but tonight he was absolutely right.
* * *
“He’s hot,” Erin said as I buckled my seatbelt. Sean waved before turning down the sidewalk to go wherever the hell he was going.
“He’s a pain in the ass,” I said.
“The best ones are,” she said, giving me a wink. “I didn’t know you were with a vampire.”
“He’s my sire,” I said. “Or was. It’s a little muddied now.”
“Oh,” she said, sipping her latte before putting it back into the cup holder and pulling the car out onto the street. “You didn’t tell him anything, right?”
“No,” I said. She didn’t look convinced. I didn’t blame her. After all, she’d just seen us waiting for her together outside my place after I’d told her I was keeping my distance from vampires. She didn’t know that I knew better than to trust Sean with any information I didn’t want him to skywrite for the world to see.
“Trust me, all of the vampires I know have their own problems right now. This isn’t even on their radar. The Factory was set on fire yesterday.”
Erin’s eyebrows shot up. “Damn. On purpose? Who had a death wish?”
“Long story,” I said. We turned onto the freeway. “Where are we going?”
Erin’s face darkened and she clutched the steering wheel. “Back up to Everett. We got a specialist to remove the bodies and sterilize the scene. I arrived today to check on their work and found another body in the garage.”
“Oh shit,” I said. “You’re sure it’s a new one? Not one killed at the same time as the other two?”
“I’m sure. We checked the whole house after we found the first ritual, looking for evidence as much as anything else. There was nothing in the garage then. Byron inherited Barry’s car, so nothing is parked there, and it was empty. But this morning…” She shook her head and reached over to grab the latte out of her cup holder.
“Kind of ballsy, isn’t it?” I asked, wishing I had a latte of my own. I’d had coffee earlier, but it never felt like enough. “Using the same crime scene.”
“Or extremely clever, depending on how you look at it,” Erin said. “But it means one of two things.” She tapped her fingers on the wheel. “Either the witch is reckless enough to risk being walked in on, or they knew when the place would be empty last night after the cleaners left.”
My hair stood on end. “Which means it’s one of the Guild Elders.”
“Or someone one of them spoke to,” she said quickly. “For being the heads of a Guild of witches, I gotta say, some people are not exactly skilled at keeping things to themselves.”
I leaned back in the seat. “Lovely.”
“This isn’t business as usual,” she said, glancing at me from the corner of her eye as she drove past a slow truck. “The Guild’s secrets are usually small things, like the number of oleander plants growing on Guild property. Repeated ritualistic murder is a bit out of everyone’s comfort zone.”
“How are they handling this news?”
Erin bit her lip. “I haven’t told them. I wanted to show you the scene first before they all flooded in to examine it themselves. Since it’s likely one of them, I didn’t want anyone destroying evidence.” She scrunched up her face. “I still can’t picture any of them doing it. I don’t really know what to think anymore.”
Erin parked on the street. Rather than opening the garage and exposing the ritual scene to the neighbors, we went in through the front door. An alarm beeped until Erin typed in the code to silence it.
The house smelled like fake lemon and bleach. The living room had been put back together. There was no sign of the first horrible homicide; the place had been scrubbed clean.
Erin opened the inner door to the garage and gestured for me to go in. She did not follow me inside.
It was a two-car garage with empty shelving at the back. The circle of blood was big enough to hold a car. A single skeleton lay in the center, arms behind the back as if they’d been tied there. Whatever restraints had been used were gone now.
With my boot, I scraped the blood and salt from the edge, breaking the circle. I didn’t know if it mattered, but I figured better safe than sorry.
I stepped into the circle and paused, as if it might suddenly explode. Nothing happened.
I bent down near the skeleton’s head and examined the jaw. The fangs were prominent; this had definitely been a vampire. But there was no flesh or blood left on the body, and no way for me to get a clue to their identity or how they’d ended up here, turned to bones and dust by some nefarious spell.
I stood and brushed off my jeans. Something near the garage door glinted in the light and caught my eye. I picked it up: a pair of black, thickly framed square glasses, the lens scuffed and scratched but unbroken. A chill moved down my spine as I looked from the glasses to the dark skeleton in the circle.
No, I thought. It couldn’t be.
I held the glasses up. “Any one of your witch friends wear these?”
She studied them for a long moment. “Jones wears reading glasses, but they’re blue,” she said after examining the frames and handing them back. “And Kiki, but hers are cat-eye-shaped and pink and she usually sticks to contacts.”
“Did these belong to Barry?” I asked.
“No, not Barry’s.” Erin shook her head, gaze drifting toward the skeleton. “I guess vampires don’t wear glasses, huh?”
“Not usually,” I said. “But I know of one who does. Or did. Her name is—was—Bea.”
I stared at the bones, trying to tell if they matched the red-haired librarian vampire who lived at the Factory. I’d assumed she had died in the fire, but if she hadn’t been home… If she’d been taken first…
Glasses hardly amounted to a positive ID, but the m
ore I thought about it, the more I was convinced it was her. It made sense. If she’d been present at the library when the mortals stormed in to set it ablaze, she would have stopped them, or at least made an effort, likely killing a few of them in the process. They could have incapacitated her, but a stake wouldn’t have held her for long and she’d have awoken in time to run out with the rest of us. Unless they had set her body on fire. I shuddered at the thought.
But if she’d been taken before, it would have been a hell of a lot easier for the mortals to get the fire going like they had.
“When did you say you found the body?” I asked.
“This afternoon. The cleaners left at 11:35 p.m. That’s when they set the alarm. No one else was supposed to be in here but according to the alarm’s log, someone turned it off a little after four am and armed it around seven. I was meant to check the place before we let anyone use it again but someone slipped in to do this first.”
“And all of the Elders have the alarm code?”
She nodded. “And probably a few others. Like I said, secrets aren’t our forte.”
So if the killer had nabbed Bea before the fire, they’d have needed to hold her until early this morning, when the ritual took place. It was less than twenty-four hours, and probably doable.
The sound of the front door opening startled both of us. I tensed as a pair of heavy shoes clomped across the floor.
“Byron,” Erin said stiffly. She stood by the garage door, up three steps from where I was. Byron came into view. He wore a collared black polo shirt with short sleeves that showed off his tattoo sleeves on each arm. His combat boots came to a stop as he spotted me and frowned.
“What’s going on here?” he demanded. Erin blocked the door, but she couldn’t block his view. His face contorted into shock when he saw the skeleton. “Dear god. What have you done?”
“Me?” Erin shook her head. “No. I found this here.”
Byron glanced from Erin to me to the corpse and pulled out his phone. Erin knocked it out of his hand and it clattered onto the wood floor. He swore and bent to grab it. Erin shot me a pleading look, but I had no clue what the hell she was pleading me to do.
I went back in the house, closing the door to the garage. It smelled musty and burned in there, and the fake lemon cleaner stink was actually something of a relief.
“Byron, listen to me. I didn’t do this!” Erin protested.
Byron had gotten hold of his phone again. “Then who did? I don’t see anyone else.”
“She found the body because your Guild sent her to check the house,” I said, folding my arms over my chest. “She was meant to find the body. So the question is, who sent her?”
Byron clamped his mouth shut.
“Byron did,” Erin told me, giving him a dark look.
“Because the Elders needed someone to do it, and you have a car and the time to drive up here early in the day,” Byron said.
“Then why are you here?” Erin asked. It was a good question.
“I figured you’d come and gone already, and I wanted to see if they got the stains out. This was Uncle Barry’s house. It should be my house, but for some reason, he left it to the Guild. And now some asshole is using it for their death magic. If that asshole is you, I’m going to—” He raised his hand. He wore a silver band on his left wrist and it glowed as he gathered the power stored inside it.
“Stop,” I said, withdrawing my sword. “Erin didn’t do this.”
“Yeah, like I should believe a Blood Traitor. You turned against your own kind. Why wouldn’t you help destroy witches by killing vampires?”
Byron’s words slammed into me like a truck. It was one thing for other vampires to call me a traitor, even if they were wrong. It was another for some witch to treat me like an enemy of the arcane.
“I’m not a Blood Traitor, and I’m damn sure not the one leaving skeletonized vampires around your Guild’s house,” I said, raising my sword. “I’m here to figure out who is and stop them. If you’ve got a problem with that, I’m happy to demonstrate my methods.”
“Seriously, Byron, stand down,” Erin said sharply. “Why would I do death magic at all? And why would I do it in Barry’s house when the Guild knew I was going to be here? That’s like putting up a billboard saying, ‘Hey guys, I’m the evil witch killing vampires!’”
Byron’s hand dropped, his bracelet going dark. “I don’t know why anyone would do death magic, especially in Barry’s house.”
“Barry did,” I said. Erin shot me a death glare and Byron’s jaw actually dropped slightly. “Not in his house, but Barry did, right?”
“You told her Guild secrets?” Byron yelled. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Erin?”
“Death magic isn’t just illegal, Byron. It’s poisonous. I’m trying to figure out who’s doing it before they destroy the Guild.”
“I know that,” he muttered. Then louder, added, “But that doesn’t mean you can run around doing everything we’ve voted not to do.”
Erin sighed heavily. “Let me guess. Carla convinced everyone to vote against using Henri’s help.”
Byron’s glare said more than words could have, but finally he said, “She was right. Outsiders have no place in this problem. We’re perfectly capable of finding the guilty party and issuing punishment on our own.”
“No, you’re not,” I said. “Because you haven’t. Three vampires are dead, and so are two humans. That’s five murders and you guys still have no clue who’s behind it.”
“Could be Erin,” Byron said. “You’ve always wanted more power.”
“Could be you,” Erin countered. “You want Barry back!”
“Barry is never coming back,” Byron shouted.
Erin shivered and pulled her blue wool coat tighter. “I know that,” she said softly. “But if someone is using his own whacko spells to bring him back, maybe they don’t.”
“Who would do that?” Byron scoffed.
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out,” I said, lowering my sword but keeping it at hand. “So why don’t you tell us what the hell you’re doing here if you’re innocent?”
Chapter 11
After several rounds of going back and forth, Byron and Erin convinced each other that neither of them was guilty of the death magic in the garage, at least enough for a temporary peace.
Byron insisted he’d only come to check on his uncle’s house. He hadn’t had time this morning, which was why he’d insisted Erin do it, but it had bothered him all day, and finally he’d decided to make the drive after work.
I wasn’t sure I believed him, but if his showing up had been an attempt to frame Erin by catching her red-handed at the scene, he seemed to have given up on that tactic.
Byron called the rest of the Elders to come to the scene and reluctantly—thanks in part to my sword—agreed to let Erin drive me home.
Less than thirty minutes later, Erin pulled up in front of my apartment building and parked in the tow-away zone in front of a fire hydrant. My shoulders were clenched and I’d been sitting rigid for the entire drive, thoughts whirling through my head.
I’d already seen the horrors of what death magic could do a few nights ago, when Erin had shown me the first set of vampire skeletons. But now this horrific magic ritual had probably killed a vampire I’d known, and it felt more terrifying, somehow. More real.
“I guess I should head back,” Erin said. She sounded like that was the last thing she wanted to do, and I didn’t blame her.
“Yeah, probably not a bad idea. Fleeing the scene will only make you look guilty. And if Byron is the killer, he can use any spin he can get to blame you.”
Erin started. “You think it’s Byron?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I know it’s odd that he showed up when he knew you’d be there. Maybe he wanted to help ‘find’ the body. Or maybe he was hoping to delay the discovery.”
Erin’s eyes widened as the implications of that washed over her. If Byron ha
d meant to kill her, he’d been thwarted by my presence.
“I have to look into the vampire who’s dead,” I said. “See if she had any connections to your people.”
Erin nodded, knuckles tight on the steering wheel. “Whoever’s doing this is either storing the magic or using it. Either way, it’s going to start taking a toll on them, and it’s going to be harder to hide. Of course, if they’ve managed to turn themselves invincible by then, it won’t matter.”
“I’d prefer to stop them before they get a chance to kill again,” I said. Because a Factory vampire was one step closer to vampires I truly cared about. Sean annoyed me to no end, but I still wanted him in this world.
Erin nodded. Her jaw was tight, and she’d been silent on the drive, mulling things over as much as I had. “I couldn’t sleep last night. I kept having nightmares about being in that circle.”
Something slammed against the car’s hood. We both jumped.
A pale face appeared in the windshield, baring sharp fangs. A vampire had jumped on the hood of Erin’s car.
Erin screamed. My heart stopped. When it started beating again, I was ready to punch through the glass to smack the vampire who sat there.
“Who the hell is that?” Erin screeched.
I looked at the grinning mouth full of fangs and sighed. “An acquaintance of mine. And not one you want to meet.” I unbuckled my seatbelt and grabbed my purse. “I’ll be in touch.”
I opened my door and the vampire climbed down off the car’s hood. As soon as the passenger’s door clicked shut, Erin pulled away from the curb. Angela stared after the car with a slightly bemused expression.
“Didn’t want to introduce me to the new fling, huh?” Angela asked, arms folded over her chest. She wore a black denim jacket, jeans, and boots. She was slightly shorter than me but always had an imposing presence. Since I’d last seen her, she’d added blonde highlights to her rust-colored hair, and now the mane of red and yellow framed her angelic face like a ring of fire.
Sanguinity Page 7